Film Review | The Change-Up (2011)

Without two such likeable and talented leads as Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman, The Change-Up feels in many ways like the kind of fantasy-meets-reality comedy that could have easily ended up in direct-to-DVD oblivion. And without such wild variation in tone and style of humour, it's a film that also feels like it could have been somewhat more than what it is. Not a great deal more, but enough to raise it up to something a little more worthwhile than the finished product we have.

Reynolds and Bateman play best friends Mitch Planko and Dave Lockwood, a layabout actor enjoying the single life and a stressed-out lawyer and family man respectively. After urinating in a fountain on a drunken night out, with each man proclaiming to be envious of the other's life, Mitch and Dave wake up to find themselves having swapped both lives and bodies, leading to the friends discovering how the other truly lives.

Without question, the two male leads are the best thing about The Change-Up. Both Reynolds' and Bateman's performances throughout are enjoyable with pleasing comic timing, charisma and chemistry. The body-swap concept is hardly original, but both actors make it work by adopting the mannerisms of both characters ably and believably. It's just a shame that for the first hour of the film, the pair are given little more to do than whine (as Dave) or spout obscenities (as Mitch). Whilst Dave is perfectly amicable, if a bit of a wet blanket, Mitch is - for the first hour at least - a completely unlikeable creation. Abrasive, arrogant and offensive, it's hard to see why Dave is actually friends with him.

It's this ill-advised approach to getting laughs in the first half that is one of the film's major problems. We're treated to a combination of gross-out humour and extreme slapstick (at one point involving kitchen knives, plug sockets and Dave's infant children) which feels at odds with the film's overriding message. Imagine a cross between American Pie and Mr. Bean played out by middle class American thirty-somethings and you're getting close to both the content and how successful it is. More often than not the humour just feels clunky and awkward.

Thankfully, things even out in the second half. The offensive content is toned down giving Reynolds and Bateman the chance to shine a little more naturally, and the film finds an enjoyable groove through which to ride out both the plot and its message. It's nothing spectacular, but if the film had settled on something along these lines for the entire running time the whole thing would have turned out better. As it is, this is uneven with far too many flaws to truly recommend it.

5/10

Fuzz Five | Things I Hate About Looper (spoilers)

I was looking forward to Looper enormously, combining, as it does, many of my favourite things in life (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Rian Johnson, Sci-Fi, Time Travel, the list goes on...), and I was really hoping it would be a film I would want to rewatch again and again. A film I would recommend to anyone and everyone. A film like Brick. A five star film.

It wasn't and I was disappointed. It was enjoyable, but not stunning; watchable but not mind-blowing. Rightly or wrongly, I was disappointed. I went home, and several days later, I wrote a list of things that disappointed me about the film. If you'll give me some leeway for having high expectations and with a healthy gap since I left the cinema, I'll give you: The reasons I wouldn't give Looper five stars:

The protagonist's relationship with himself

I like a lot about both Willis and Gordon-Levitt, and I like a lot about the way that they interact on screen in Looper. They have more chemistry than the average action twosome for the time that they are onscreen together. The problem is that they aren't a twosome. They're a onesome. There should be a whole set of fascinating mental challenges that come with simply having a conversation with a version of yourself from 30 years ago, that go beyond simply being more experienced and confident. Someone facing themselves would have a much stronger grasp of the hopes, dreams and insecurities of their opposition, and a conversation between the two of them should give a writer huge scope for an exchange unlike anything possible in a conventional film. Instead, it felt at times like Willis was simply Gordon-Levitt's father, berating a sulky teenager for a misspent youth, which I see as a missed opportunity.

The world

So, there's some sort of problem with criminal gangs, and drug taking and “vagrants”, and there seem to be both slum areas and ultra-modern apartments, but there's little or no attempt to weave that into a convincing narrative of society. Without a wider context, it's difficult to judge the relative danger the protagonist is in (are they running from a small criminal gang, who are themselves trying to stay out of sight, or do this gang “run the city”?) and also difficult to empathise with anyone, since their world feels completely disjointed from the viewer's.

The telekinesis

This is in some ways a follow-on from the above point. Why bring telekinesis into the story? It doesn't form a seamless part of the world that the movie is set in (if it was, wouldn't we occasionally see people using it to pass each other small objects?) and there's no attempt to go into the social repercussions of the emergence such a skill in any depth. It's almost as if it was a last minute addition that the filmmaker doesn't care about. That's not necessarily a killer blow to the film, but it is frustrating when such a major plot point revolves around something that feels like it has been inserted with little care.

The arbitrary action scene

In a film which largely manages to construct interesting, original set pieces, it is a real disappointment to me that the showdown between two time travelling criminals comes down to a sequence with Bruce Willis mowing down a parade of faceless goons with two ludicrous machine guns. I'd hope that anyone writing, producing or directing such a scene would question whether maybe an audience might have seen this before, in any of hundreds of other action films, and whether, perhaps, there was a more engaging way of getting rid of an entire organisation of gun toting gangsters that you inconveniently wrote into your story.

The time travel

This is the big one. If you're making a serious time travel movie, then that aspect of it has to make some sort of sense, and you have to make some effort to avoid paradoxes. To not do this is to instantly trade away any intellectual capital you've invested in crafting the rest of the plot.

So: As a time travel story teller, a decision needs to be made. Is the traveller moving backwards in his own timeline, or moving into a different timeline. If the latter, you can do whatever you like: He can change anything, but it will only have repercussions in the future of his new timeline. If the former, however, you have to be careful to avoid kill-your-grandfather type paradoxes. Looper chooses the former, but makes no attempt to avoid these paradoxes, instead appearing to revel in them. There were numerous bits that bothered me, mostly involving memories, or scars, but I'll stick to the simplest one: A man is butchered horribly in the present, to bring his future self into line. He then, apparently, ages thirty years, burdened by awful disabilities, is sent back in time to be killed, and somehow escapes from his younger self, despite not having legs.

I find it very difficult to fully enjoy a film where a filmmaker has produced a situation like that, which makes no logical sense at all, and leaves the viewer confused and frustrated. It smacks of laziness, carelessness or a lack of respect for the audience, none of which are things I expected from this movie.

Film Review | The Cable Guy (1996)

It's almost certainly easier for audiences to take in Jim Carrey's unnerving and darkly charged performance now than it was when The Cable Guy was first released. It's Carrey's inhabiting of the role that drives much of the film's success, so unless you can get behind him, it's unlikely you'll get much from the film as a whole.

Carrey stars as the eponymous televisual technician, Chip Matthews, who befriends Steven Kovacs (Matthew Broderick) after installing his cable for him. It's a friendship which swings wildly from the pleasant to the downright creepy, thanks in no small part to Chip's erratic behaviour.

The Cable Guy is at its best when at its darkest, with Carrey's demented turn as Chip at its heart. Borrowing from his rubber-faced repertoire only occasionally, this, along with his performance in 1995's Batman Forever, was the point in Carrey's career that he began to demonstrate he was more than just pratfalls and gurning. There are some more overtly silly scenes here - a friendly basketball match which escalates in the extreme being a prime example - but there are also plenty of moments, particularly in the final third, where Carrey along with director Ben Stiller show they can create something really quite unsettling. It's at these moments that The Cable Guy reveals itself as something more than just another wacky comedy.

It's a shame that it takes far too long to get there. With a relatively slight running time of just an hour and a half, this really shouldn't be the case. The first hour has some good moments, but there's also far too much here which simply doesn't do much at all. The cast aside from Carrey are functional at best, with Broderick doing everything he can to make you neither like nor hate his mawkish everyman, and the biggest achievement of the remainder being how many future big stars there are littered amongst them without any of them impressing you.

The Cable Guy ultimately evens out as something very entertaining but a little too patchy to be anything more. If the balance of the film was readjusted so that it took half the time to get to the darker and more successful stuff, and there was twice as much of it when you got there, this would be a classic.

7/10

Film Review | A Bug's Life (1998)

A Bug's Life has possibly the most unenviable position in Pixar's cinematic canon, sitting chronologically as it does between the release of Toy Story and Toy Story 2, films quite rightly hailed as two of the studios very best. It was also in cinemas at the same time as rival studio DreamWorks' first ever animated release, Antz, a film with  several similarities in character and concept to Pixar's second feature. It was therefore a film that needed to work incredibly hard to make itself stand out.

A Bug's Life follows Flik (Dave Foley), an ant who lives in a colony terrorized by a swarm of grasshoppers led by the nefarious Hopper (Kevin Spacey). Flik also has a tendency to leave destruction in his wake, especially when he attempts to help his fellow ants. After Flik causes the entire harvest gathered for the grasshoppers to be destroyed, he volunteers to travel to the city in order to find someone who will help rid them of the grasshoppers for good.

Now nearly fourteen years old, revisiting A Bug's Life could have been an experience of seeing how much animation has advanced since Pixar first started making feature length films, but thankfully this isn't the case. Watching the film on Blu-ray only served to enhance how vibrant and colourful the studios animation still appears. There are one or two elements which may show the film's relative age in the medium - the bird comes to mind first, as well as a couple of other larger elements (well, from an ant's perspective anyway) - but never to the extent of taking anything away from it.

That said, when compared to Toy Story (something that A Bug's Life will have to put up with permanently), the film at times comes across as less adventurous and a little more safe in its design. Andy's bedroom is characterised by the variety and difference between all of his toys, with each feeling like a distinct personality and beautifully realised in its own way. Ants are, by definition, pretty similar looking. There may be subtle differences between Flik and his fellow ants, but never enough to distinguish one ant from the next. The background characters in Toy Story featured a wealth of individuals who may only have had a minute or two of screen time but were brought to life as their own toy; here we have an army of blue ants who for all intents and purposes look exactly the same, facing off against grasshoppers who by and large look the same as each other. It just doesn't have the same impact.

The same can be said for the story. Finding its roots in the fable "The Ant And The Grasshopper" by Aesop, the film owes just as much to Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. But whilst the plot is engaging and fun with clear cinematic heritage, this is much more firmly grounded in the family and children's entertainment bracket than the Toy Story franchise and other later Pixar efforts. The hidden humour and in-jokes for the grown-ups are much scarcer, mainly provided through the grasshopper characters, and feel much less subtle than what many have come to expect from the studio by now.

Ultimately, A Bug's Life is a victim of Pixar's success both before, in the form of Toy Story, and since. It's a fun, well made, enjoyable film. But when it comes from a studio as innovative and consistently outstanding in terms of output as Pixar, it's a film that is likely to get overshadowed. In some ways that's a shame, as A Bug's Life is a genuinely very good film; in others, it's right that the studio's relatively superior efforts get the recognition.

8/10

Film Review | Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

Cowboys & Aliens stars Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. It's directed by the guy who successfully brought the Iron Man franchise to the big screen. These facts alone mean that the film being no more than enjoyable is a serious problem.

As its title may suggest, Cowboys & Aliens is a Western-sci-fi mash-up where the Old West meets extra-terrestrial invasion. Jake Lonergan (Craig) awakes in the desert with no memory of who he is or how he got there. Heading into the nearest town, a gold rush settlement on its knees named Absolution, Lonergan quickly finds himself on the wrong side of local cattle magnate Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford) as well as his son Percy (Dano), before the aliens make themselves known to all within the town and begin abduction without prejudice.

Cowboys & Aliens may as well be sponsored by Ronseal (with apologies to any non-UK readers) in that it does exactly what it says on the tin. It has cowboys - some of whom even herd cattle - and it has aliens. They do battle. It's fun. Does it push boundaries? Certainly not. Does it come across as some B-movie knock-up with a minuscule budge? No, it doesn't. The plot paces along without, for the most part, outstaying its welcome. The whole idea brings to mind that episode of The Big Bang Theory where Leonard, Sheldon and company are taken in by the "Mystic Warlords Of Ka'a" playing-card-based  role-playing-game expansion pack "Wild West And Witches". If you've ever wondered who would win in a battle between Billy The Kid and the aliens from Independence Day then Cowboys And Aliens will be right up your street. Otherwise it'll probably entertain you, but do very little else.

Unfortunately, that's Cowboys & Aliens's biggest failing. The last film that teamed up Indiana Jones and James Bond was Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade, and, taking into account popular and critical opinion, it delivered a resounding cinematic triumph. Cowboys & Aliens doesn't. It's not awful by any means, but  neither is it anything spectacular. It barely manages "good" at times. It brings together the most recent 007 - you know, the one that saved the franchise from self-parody - and Dr. Henry Jones Jr., one of the greatest action adventure heroes of all time, and makes something a notch above average at best.

Not only that, but the director is Jon Favreau, the man who realised that Robert Downey Jr. is pretty much the real-life version of Tony Stark. When you appreciate that the supporting cast features an underutilised Sam Rockwell and Paul Dano - watch Moon and There Will Be Blood respectively to see the talent we're dealing with here - it won't be long before you start asking the question: why isn't this film better?

If you're looking for something easy on the grey matter that mashes up two genres you may have thought would never collide in any meaningful way on screen, Cowboys & Aliens may be one of the few worthwhile options you're left with before plumbing the depths of the straight-to-DVD bargain bin. But, if you're a fan of modern cinema, it's likely that you'll find yourself shaking your head at the talent going to waste here as you watch that six-shooter aimed squarely at ET's over-sized skull.

6/10

Film Review | Scream 4 (2011)

The Scream franchise is one that has had ups and downs, never reaching the quality that its widespread popularity might suggest, but at the same time being built on an intriguing idea of "meta-horror" that actually meant the concept improved from the first to the second installment. Having overstretched the series in the second sequel, writer and director Wes Craven wisely hung up the Ghostface mask seemingly for good at the turn of the 21st Century. But if the interceding decade has taught us anything it's these two facts: four is the new three, no matter how ill-advised returning to a franchise might be; and the horror genre is constantly being reinvented, thereby giving Mr. Craven a whole ten years worth of blood and gore to riff upon.

Scream 4 sees Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) return to Woodsboro unsurprisingly for the first time since the events of Scream 3, this time to promote her new book. No sooner has she returned (on the anniversary of the original Woodsboro Murders no less) than a new series of killings begins. Sheriff Dewey Riley (David Arquette) and wife Gail (Courtney Cox) are soon on the case once again, as a whole new generation of Woodsboro residents gets caught up in the commotion and fear.

Scream 4 has problems from the get-go, with an opening so convoluted it almost goes beyond parody. The film takes clear digs at franchises that have experienced success since the last Scream, most prominently the Saw films, for delivering excessive gore without any character development, and then follows those self-same patterns. Craven ultimately comes across as more than a little bitter: Saw may lack character development, but it is still the most successful horror franchise ever made, and it does extreme gore better than anything seen here.

The other key problem is Craven's bullish perseverance with the slasher template established in the original. When he did it in 1996, it was a fresh twisted on a hackneyed subgenre. In 2000, when Scream 3 was released, it was tired. Over a decade on the shelf hasn't made Ghostface's knife any sharper since then. 

And yet, once the film settles down, the concept behind a lot of what happens actually does manage to inject something new into the franchise for the first time since 1997's Scream 2. Eric Knudsen and Rory Culkin take over the mantle of resident film geeks from Jamie Kennedy's Randy, supplying insight into how the "rules" of horror have changed. So we have reference to everything from the spate of horror remakes seen in recent years to the "found footage" style of the REC and Paranormal Activity franchises, giving Scream 4 the potential to take a leap into contemporary horror with a "meta" twist. But whilst it dips its toe in the water here and there, it's a leap the film never has the courage, nor vitality, to make.

Ultimately, Scream 4 can't be seen as a wholly wasted opportunity, but it's also never anything particularly worthwhile.  Is it better than Scream 3? Yes, but that's hardly something to celebrate. It ends up as yet another example of why returning to a long-dormant franchise to simply add a new installment, without a fresh approach or rebooted concept, is rarely - if ever - a good idea.

5/10

Film Review | Real Steel (2011)

Hoping to answer the almost certainly seldom-asked question "What would a cross between Rocky and Transformers look like?", Real Steel aims firmly and steadily for the family action market in a way that isn't seen too often in contemporary cinema. But whilst the action may be more hit than miss, the real problem is in the morals on display here.

Hugh Jackman is Charlie Kenton, a former professional boxer living in the near-future USA where robot boxing has replaced the human version of the sport. Charlie is struggling to make a living through acquiring robot boxers and pitting them in fights, usually losing through a combination of arrogance and haste. However, Charlie's fortunes appear to turn for the better once his estranged young son Max (Dakota Goyo) ends up in his care, and the two discover new hope in a discarded robot fighter named Atom.

What Real Steel does well works pleasingly enough. The fight scenes, although occasionally feeling too much like footage from a video game, are entertaining if at times unspectacular, with director Shawn Levy never falling into the oversaturated action mess presented all too often by Mr. Bay in the Transformers franchise. The world of robot boxing is enjoyably realised, feeling like a cross between UFC and Scrapheap Challenge, and although technology is clearly nowhere near advancing as quickly as the near-future setting would require, I never questioned the universe the characters inhabit.

The performances are a real mixed bag here, with Jackman firmly on autopilot, only threatening to show some real charm in the film's final act. Goyo ranges from passable to really quite irritating with some hackneyed "kid who behaves older than he is" tropes from yesteryear thrown in for bad measure here and there. Jackman and Goyo never truly gel until the film's climax, with some particularly jarring scenes near the start of the film. The strongest performance here comes from Evangeline Lilly as Charlie's childhood-friend-cum-love-interest Bailey, whose time on screen is genuinely enjoyable although the character disappointingly becomes marginalised, her arc left hanging, as the film progresses.

The real issues with Real Steel come from its moral compass, which seems to swing as wildly in the wrong direction as that owned by one Captain Jack Sparrow. Sparrow, in fact, provides a fitting example of a successful family action hero's character arc: it's expected that, like Sparrow, the protagonist will undergo a process of change from selfish/arrogant/alone to selfless/humble/surrounded by friends and/or family. However, Jackson's character here is just too despicable for a large part of the film to the point that it's very hard to get behind him at all. His first action towards Max after discovering he is now in his charge is to sell him. As in for money. A fact which he also doesn't do a lot to hide from Max. Not long after this, after Max has almost fallen to his death in a junkyard, Charlie proceeds to leave his son in said junkyard for a whole night in a rainstorm. With these actions seemingly going unpunished in any way either morally or through the law, Charlie remained for a significant portion of the film a character to whom I neither established nor wanted any connection, empathetic or otherwise.

Despite myself and the film's faults, I found myself genuinely engrossed in Real Steel's finale. Even though the way in which the film had arrived at this point was decidedly iffy, the spirit of Balboa vs. Creed could be keenly felt, and I ended up drawn in and even rooting for Charlie, Max and Atom. But, after the credits roll, it's hard to forget the mish-mash of acting quality and immoral plot threads that have led up to the film's climax. Real Steel ends up falling somewhere uncomfortably in the middle ground of mediocrity: by no means awful in some ways, but unforgivably so in others.

5/10